Would it not be nice, if there was such a tool for Macintosh?

It basically combines the feature of the “tail” command to continously display the last entries of a given file on the screen with the “grep” command, which searches the input files for lines containing a match to a given pattern list and finally plays a sound file via afplay, if the pattern is found.

Command

Richard also has a blog post up, which contains also a link into his Github repository.

Next level

That command is working locally. But the log files I use daily are on a remote server, a sandbox in my case. There are no sound files, no audio player and even it there were, its of no use, if it beeps in the server room. Might scare some admins, if it randomly beeps though.

Plus I also don’t want to install stuff on the sandbox. We delete them on a regular base and make new ones. Installing stuff would be another preparation step, which costs time.

I was wondering, if it was possible to use my local Macintosh files and hardware and started to adjust the above solution.

The Benny Hill theme

Lessons Learned for me

First, we are a global, intensively knowledgable community. As so often in development, someone somewhere might had the same obstacle and can help you out. Or s/he has the right skills to solve your problem. This was an exercise in tester pairing btw.

So reach out and connect. It can only be a win win situation.

Second, if something troubles / irritates you enough, it might be worth to investigate and automate it.

Yes, it can be called automation. We created a small line of code to help us in our testing work.

Third, remember that we have more senses in our portfolio than “just” our eyes, to watch what the software is doing.